Anne grasped my pages with happiness, trust, and compassion.

Her hands felt rigid and confident, screaming to write her thoughts.

Given as a present for her 13th birthday.

My pages, blank, ready for her to pour her ongoing thoughts.

She would write down every word that never left her tongue, 

However, she would feed me hope of her freedom and love that she expressed everywhere, to everyone. 

One day she would be free from these chains.

She believed hope would be her guide to her paradise.

I could tell she could taste the outside world already.

She may have been the storyteller, but I was the illustrator.

Her words whispered beneath her lips murmuring things no one would understand.

After all she was trapped in this attic for two years, but I could tell hope sparked on my pages, a match striking for flare.

I was the somebody she would tell about her day, the only one who would listen.

I was like her mother made with pages, since she never really got along with her real mother.

Page by page, her story seeped into my consciousness, I was now drowning in ink and her feelings. 

The ink feels like weights against me, pounding me to the ground.

Longer and longer I could tell, she longed for nothing but freedom and was full of hope.

I admired her longing for her freedom, making a stance for her dreams.

I truly believed she would get freedom, if she kept her hope and head up.

Day after day I could see the misery sinking in her eyes.

She was a shriveled up flower, no sun for days.

But hope beamed inside, like a sunray.

Drained from lack of knowledge and free will from the outside world.

Her words became more desperate for her long awaited freedom.

Alas I was no wish granter! I couldn’t cease her sorrow, I could only listen.

Mr. Kraler had gotten blackmailed.

Miep said the allies were coming to save them.

Even a thief had come in the middle of the night!

I couldn’t bear to see her write these words on my pages.

The poor girl didn’t deserve this! She had a good heart filled with dreams she wanted to make true.

She closed my cover, I don’t know if I could take this anymore.

But a few words of hope opened me back up into the story.

One day, I thought it would be the same, stuck in a forever loop in time.

I felt Anne’s hands fly across my pages.

True hope was in the palm of her hands, bursting onto the pages.

Then she wrote these words, “To whoever finds this, help me.”

She was taken, striped from her freedom, yet she almost made it, having full hope.

Over the hours and days, I knew the answer was clear. It was hope that had kept her alive all these dreadful years.

I never saw her again, it seemed like millions of years later, when I was finally found.

His grasp felt a lot different than Anne’s, soft and tight.

Tears poured down his face onto my silky cover,

Reading my words, I thought to myself.

If she can’t carry on her hope, I will show the world she could.

I would become the storyteller after all this time.